Field of the Disclosure
The described technology generally relates to transmitting data with forward error correction (FEC). More specifically, the disclosure is directed to devices, systems, and methods related to interlacing transmitted data for use in a high throughput system that uses forward error correction to provide for improved performance.
Description of Related Art
Forward error correction (FEC) is used on communication channels where there is a chance that data can be lost or corrupted. With some communication channels, such as a packet network where packets are likely to be discarded if corrupted, the channel would experience erasures much more than corruption, but FEC can be used in both cases to recover from losses. With FEC, an encoder encodes the source data to be sent with some repair data that can be used at a decoder to recover from losses. Typically, the encoder is used at or near a transmitter and the decoder is used at or near a receiver.
Sometimes source data is available at the transmitter in advance and can be encoded well before the encoded data needs to be transmitted, but for many streaming applications, the latency between the time the source data is made available to the transmitter and encoder and the time the source data is output by the receiver needs to be very small. Latency might be in part a function of the type of FEC coding used and might be in part a function of how much hardware or processing power is available to encoders and decoders. For example, FEC encoding that applies repair data over a large span of the source data might result in added latency as a decoder has to wait to receive repair data to recover for much earlier sent source data.